Hierarchical, Distributed and Brain-Inspired Learning for Internet of Things Systems

In this paper, we propose EdgeHD, a hierarchy-aware learning solution that performs online training and inference in a highly distributed, cost-effective way. We use brain-inspired hyperdimensional (HD) computing as the key enabler. HD computing performs the computation tasks on a high-dimensional space to emulate functionalities of the human memory, such as inter-data relationship reasoning and information aggregation. EdgeHD exploits HD computing to effectively learn the classification models on individual devices and combine the models through the hierarchical IoT nodes without high communication costs. We also propose a hardware design that accelerates EdgeHD on low-power FPGA platforms. We evaluated EdgeHD for a wide range of real-world classification applications. The evaluation shows that EdgeHD provides highly efficient computation with reduced communication. For example, EdgeHD achieves on average 3.4\times and 11.7\times (1.9\times and 7.8\times) speedup and energy efficiency improvement during the training (inference) as compared to the centralized learning approach. It reduces the communication costs by 85% for the training and 78% for the inference.